Keyboard Adventures

Time for more asinine writing. If this isn't your sort of thing, I suppose it is a hint to move on with life and wait for the next non-whiney post.

Still here? Cool.

I'm just looking for an excuse to exercise the new Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 that I ordered from EliteKeyboards (see link). It seems like an exercise in excess, considering that I already have the HHKB2 Lite version, but the need to use up the SGD600 worth of ``Flexi'' benefits was the main force behind the choice of purchase. And by a strange coincidence, the one day before the delivery was supposed to be done at my place, my HHKB2 Lite mysteriously decided to suicide. The hardware could not be detected by the machines that it was connected to, and it was frustrating and confusing for a while. In the end, I had to break out the potato keyboard that came with my workstation, the flimsy-feeling Dell keyboard that was still mint in box. Typing with that potato was harrowing, and I was glad that I had brought along Edythe-II to do most of the typing on with regards to the work that I was doing---I will talk about that in a bit.

That the HHKB2 Lite suicided was an excuse on its own to take it apart for a much needed washing. The keys and the tray itself had accumulated nearly five years worth of skin flakes, hair and what not, and it felt more hygenic to send them all through the wash while I was taking apart the keyboard itself in an attempt to figure out what was the reason for its inoperability. From what I can tell, it seems that the controller card was not broken---it was more likely that there's a short in the USB cable that was set up to connect the keyboard controller to the computer itself. I stripped the cable out, and now I will need to get hold of a multimeter and other electronic/electrical tools to confirm my suspicions. If proven correct, perhaps I can resurrect the HHKB2 Lite by rewiring the connector cable.

My experience with Edythe-II has been quite interesting lately. As you may already know, Edythe-II's native screen resolution is 2560×1440 over a 16:9 screen 13.3" large. That's a pretty high PPI right there (I'm too lazy to do the math to find out just how much it is, but I think a back-of-the-envelope calculation yielded something to the order of 220+ PPI). I hadn't been using her at the native resolution thus far---something about the Windows 8.1 ability of ``rescaling'' the font size and what not that ended with the display being used at what was effectively 2048×1152. I had tried the native resolution on the get go, but I think my eyes hadn't figured out how to focus on it yet, and the rescaled resolution was more comfortable.

Until recently that is.

Now I operate at the native resolution, and holy cow it's awesome. Four 78+ columns of text windows for coding on a screen that is no larger than an A4 piece of paper---actual bliss. That alone though was not the only reason why operating at the native resolution was a good thing.

You see, I have discovered a couple of Windows keyboard shortcuts that had changed the way I operate the machines forever.

The new shortcuts that I discovered were the Windows + Left Arrow, Windows + Right Arrow and Windows + Up Arrow commands. Windows + Left/Right Arrow will automatically resize the window to take up the entire height and half the screen width, either left or right, while Windows + Up Arrow will maximise the window. This means that in a crude way, there is an easy means of performing tiling with Windows. This also means that I don't have to fiddle with the mouse to adjust the actual size of the windows when I want to code and refer to the documentation at the same time. Combining this with the X-Windows style mouse of achieving focus by hovering instead of clicking meant that my overall operability of the Windows operating system just shot through the roof.

Alright, I am done with the simple stuff that I want to write. Going to post this up and carry on with work once again.

Till the next update.